Richard O’Lenick had been attending a gun expo in Reno, Nevada, before boarding a flight back to New Jersey. The 53-year-old, who owns Gun for Hire, a shooting range and firearms shop in Woodland Park, wasn’t traveling alone. His employee, Juan Mejia, a retired police officer, was traveling with him on American Airlines Flight 618 out of Dallas, the last stretch of the trip home to Newark. By his own account, it started out as an unremarkable flight.
That changed when a passenger a few rows away began talking about the plane going down, according to O’Lenick, who described what happened next to The Daily Voice in an account later reported by the New York Post. “I don’t love to fly, and he just looks at me and goes, ‘We’re all going to die. This plane is going to crash,'” O’Lenick recalled.
